Scientific Research Made Easy with Scitopia

When I was studying Physics back in college, I spent a lot of time using the resources at my school libraries when I had lab reports and research papers to write. If I had Scitopia, I might have been...

When I was studying Physics back in college, I spent a lot of time using the resources at my school libraries when I had lab reports and research papers to write. If I had Scitopia, I might have been able to do a lot of that research from my dorm room instead of a library computer lab. Scitopia indexes millions of documents from over 15 academic and research societies and government agencies and makes all of that information available for free.

Scitopia is a science student's dream. The service partners with over societies like the American Institute of Physics, the Acoustical Society of America, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Electrochemical Society for journal articles and scientific papers. Scitopia is enrolling more scientific societies and organizations and is hoping to expand its database of resources.

The service is very simple, and reminds me of Google. There's a search box in the middle of the page and not much else. Type in your search term and you'll be get results sorted by relevancy. If you click the Advanced tab at the top of the page, you'll see filtering options that will help you refine your search.

Scitopia's search results include research papers, journal articles, patents, and government documents. Scitopia doesn't aggregate documents or crawl the Web, either; all of its documents are provided by the scholarly societies and groups that participate. This means that you won't find someone's non-peer-reviewed opinion paper or rambling manifesto mixed in with your search results, and you can be sure that the documents you get have been reviewed by members of the scientific community.

The only downside to Scitopia is that the search results lead you to the individual sites of the organizations who own the paper. This means that once you click through, if you need the full text of an article, you may need to have a membership with that society, or be part of an educational or government institution that has access to those documents. Most colleges and universities provide this kind of access to their students, staff, and faculty, so if you're a student you're in good shape.

Even so, Scitopia is a great resource to add to your list of bookmarks if you're doing any kind of academic research. The search is speedy and the results are accurate and useful, something I can't always say about a Google search for a scientific term.